Friday 25 April 2014 16.32 EDT
First published on Friday 25 April 2014 16.32 EDT

Temping agencies, semi-self-employment and long-term short-term contracts. All these things mar Britain's genuinely remarkable bounce back in jobs, but nothing embodies the anxiety of the age like zero-hours contracts. In the worst cases, they are the 21st-century equivalent of the desperate dawn queue at the Victorian factory gate.

Workers can have no idea whether they will be employed from one day to the next, while being barred from taking alternative employment, and can even be sent home with half their pay halfway through a shift. The extent of such abuses is uncertain. Official figures have been too rosy, relying on staff describing contracts they are hazy about. But regardless of whether one prefers the official zero-hours tally of a few hundred thousand, or overblown union claims of 5.5 million workers, the numbers have recently soared.

The progressive heart bursts with a desire to ban no-strings hiring. But the head says that even unreliable work may be better than no work at all. It cautions, too, that in a low-investment economy, addicted to commodified labour, employers might answer demands to provide steady jobs by simply refusing to hire. So what is the way through?

Yesterday, Ed Miliband provided Labour's cautious but worthwhile answer. There would be no outright ban, but compensation for shifts cancelled midway through, a bar on the lopsided "exclusivity clauses", under which employers can demand that alternative work is refused without any guarantee in return, and a "right to demand" fixed hours (though it is not clear how many) after a long period of working at the whim of the company.

This last slogan echoes New Labour's "right to request" flexible working, which did not mandate family-friendly working as such, but insisted that employers could say no only when they could give a good reason. It came to be regarded as a success, although, with such semi-compulsory "nudging", everything depends on the detail. A similar right to request deferred retirement got nowhere; real change had to await the abolition of the retirement age.

So there are nits to pick but, by getting specific, Labour puts the coalition on the back foot. Vince Cable talked at the Lib Dem conference about clamping down on zero-hour abuses, but, in a consultation paper slipped out just before Christmas, three of the four options canvassed amounted to not doing very much. Mr Cable may well want to do something, but for the Conservative right any action at all is simply red tape. Mr Cable is going to need to fight very hard against getting tangled up in that stale metaphor.